Poem of the Day: ‘How Like a Winter Hath My Absence Been’

In the one hundred fifty-four sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), the seasons, invoked as metaphors for lovers’ joys and sorrows, turn up again and again, like pages in a calendar. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” asks the speaker at the start of Sonnet 18. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” begins the famous autumnal “Sonnet 73,” which appeared as Poem of the Day last October. And there’s “Sonnet 98,” Poem of the Day for Shakespeare’s birthday this year, when “proud-pied April” has made everything new, except the unending winter of a separation. 

Sonnet 97, today’s Shakespearean sonnet, marks the start of bleak December and the inexorable shortening of the days. It takes up again this idea of separation as winter. “How like a winter hath my absence been,” says the speaker in the first line. It’s a strange way to put things: generally you’d imagine yourself as the fixed point of the relational compass, present to your own vivid daily circumstances, while the other person inhabits the shadowy land of absence.